Deliver Professional Applications with Wolfram Player Pro

Does this scenario sound familiar? You’ve created a real-time analytics interface for your internal data in Mathematica and you want to share it with your colleagues. But they don’t have, or typically need, Mathematica.

You aren’t alone. Many of our users have approached me with similar concerns. That’s why we created Wolfram Player Pro—the professional platform for running interactive applications based on Wolfram technology.

Player Pro is a high-level deployment engine for application developers. We’ve just released a new version that supports almost all the functionality of Mathematica 8, giving you everything you need to deploy your applications to your colleagues or clients. And with this version, you can not only deploy reports, applets, and other material as full-featured desktop applications or documents, but also as interactive web tools using the new browser plugin.

Over the years I’ve talked with many users who enjoyed using Mathematica in their work, but weren’t sure how to take it to the next level. Player Pro solved their problems—and it can help you too.

Many of our users want to share the things they create in Mathematica. Sometimes they distribute static images or convert their documents to a word processing format, but that reduces the value of their work. With the release of Mathematica 8, Computable Document Format (CDF) has become the most convenient way to share interactive content. Player Pro not only supports CDF, but also more advanced applications requiring all the computational capabilities of Mathematica—data import, database connectivity, text input, and so on—so you can distribute analysis tools or computational applications that your colleagues or customers can use with their own data.

One example of what Player Pro is capable of is BEST Viewpoints, which was designed in Mathematica and runs as a Player Pro application. It provides a graphical user interface for data analysis and visualization, taking advantage of Mathematica‘s integration of professional quality graphics and statistics capabilities.

Many users have asked me how they can keep their code from being viewed or reverse engineered by their clients. To encrypt source code, just use the Encode command on a package or use DumpSave to create a .mx binary file. Watch this screencast for an example (we recommend viewing it in full-screen mode).

Some people who already use Player Pro have been asking us about license management. I’m happy to say that we’ve added support for this to the new version. Through our activation system, you can manage licenses for your customers or colleagues; once one person is finished with Player Pro, you can transfer his or her license to another user. Discounts are available for bulk license purchases.

With the power of Mathematica at a fraction of the cost, Player Pro can be your professional platform for deploying interactive applications.